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Our Foundation

Honoring and Preserving Shared Human Journeys

We believe that every story holds the power to shape the future. By combining meticulous archival preservation with visual and qualitative advocacy, we connect individual voices to global dialogues.

Our Team

Meet the collective of dedicated researchers, humanitarians, community leaders, and archivists shaping our shared mission.

Our Impact

See how we bridge documentation and action to drive local community initiatives, influence policy directions, and raise awareness.
Oral History Project | The Refugee Archive

An Oral History Archive of
Real-Time Displacement

Field work Interview

Why oral history and why now?

Most data on displaced women is aggregate; numbers without context. The oral history format does what statistics cannot: it records what it actually feels like to live through displacement and its costs, and what women know about their own situation that no survey has asked.

We focus specifically on female-headed households because this population is systematically undercounted and underserved. They are not a subset of the refugee crisis; they are often its center.

And we do this in real time. Not retrospectively. These are not archived memories of past displacement. These are current, ongoing accounts recorded while women are still living through them.

The

Archive

Speaks

Consent-led, trauma-informed,
locally grounded.

Every oral history begins with a trusted local partner — an organization already embedded in the community. We don't arrive as outsiders with recorders. Our field researchers build relationships first. Interviews unfold across multiple sessions, giving women time and full control over what they share.

Learn more about our field methodology

The Methodology

How we capture history.

01

Partner

We partner with local organizations and community leaders in areas hosting refugees and internally displaced persons affected by war, conflict, and disaster. Together, we create inclusive programs that give single mothers space to share their stories. Our work challenges harmful stigma around mothers raising children outside patriarchal households.
02

Partner
Training

Education and training are designed for each partner based on local geography, language, culture, and oral history experience. Programs cover core methods such as research ethics, trauma-aware interviewing, open-ended questioning, and data management. We support partners with technology for digital data collection and secure storage.
03

Publish &
Advocate

The Refugee Archive curates and shares portions of oral histories collected across social media and the web. We publish interviews, blog posts, and analytical summaries connecting to current humanitarian contexts.

Refugee Voices is a space where single mothers publish blog posts and share media to explain concepts in their own words.

04

Archive

We partner with a university to preserve the full, unedited record of our work, including audio, video, transcripts, and images. This provides secure, long-term storage on university-managed systems following international standards for ethics and privacy, making collections available to those working to improve policy.
05

Evidence &
Learning

We produce qualitative research and monitoring, evaluation, and learning projects. We turn what displaced single mothers are saying into clear findings, recommendations, and tools that can shape policy, programs, procurement, and funding globally.

Displacement and Conflict Snapshot

8.3B People in the world Approximate 2026 population
61 Active state conflicts 2026, latest full global year
11 Wars Within those 61 conflicts
117.3M Forcibly displaced End-June 2025, UNHCR update

Latest figures available in 2026

No Global Count Yet

Female-headed households and single mothers raising children in displacement contexts are not fully counted.

Even though disaggregation data have improved, household-level data is still incomplete.

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